Whaddaya Know: This one-time Wichitan played fictional detective Charlie Chan in 22 movies. Who was he? (Answer p. 21) Inside: Garlic...It's so stinking good!
Vol 40 • No. 12
Volunteers get old Joyland carousel rolling at Botanica
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By Joe Stumpe When Botanica was given the old carousel from Joyland amusement park, it came with one roller coaster-sized problem: It wasn’t in anything close to useable shape. Built in 1949, the carousel had been exposed to the elements for decades before being placed in storage after Joyland’s 2006 closing. This month, it’s expected to open to the public again, thanks in large part to some mechanically-minded volunteers who got the thing spinning again. “We couldn’t have done it without them,” Marty Miller, executive director of Botanica, said. “They put in thousands of hours.” As volunteer crew leader Dan Wilson recalls, the effort grew out of his old job with WDM Architects (Wilson is the firm’s original “W”), which designed the 9,000-square-foot,
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Joy makers
Photo by Joe Stumpe
Clockwise from top, Dan Wilson, Melvin Hollenbeck, Charley Davidson and Duane Hanson helped restore the old Joyland carousel, which will open to the public at Botanica later this month. mostly glass building that now houses try in her field. the carousel. Wilson knew restoration “I just asked Marty has anybody of the carousel’s horses was underway stepped forward to do the machine by Marlene Irvin, a former employee part of the carousel?” Wilson said. “He of Chance Rides Manufacturing and said a couple of guys had talked about one of the few specialists in the coun- it but nobody’s really committed to it
November 2019 or brought it up again.” Not long after, Wilson said, “I woke up in the middle of the night and thought ‘Hey, here I am pretty much retired, I’ve restored an old car, I can do this.’” It turned out to be a little bigger job than a car. “We got it in pieces, and the pieces were rusty and greasy – I mean a lot of grease. All the wood pieces were pretty much rotten and unusable.” Starting three years ago this February, Wilson started working on the parts in a warehouse near the airport owned by Roger Nelson, whose family had owned Joyland. “Roger Nelson was of great value because he and his brother used to take it down every winter and put it up in the spring,” Wilson said. “That’s the only reason it’s in good enough shape to be restored.” The carousel’s metal parts needed to be cleaned and sandblasted, powder-coated, painted and repainted and put back together. All the wood pieces See Carousel, page 10
Not crazy cat people Sue and Ray Jones helped feral cats. Then the City of Augusta took them to court.
the active age AUGUSTA – Sue and Ray Jones want to make one thing clear. “We’re not crazy old doddering people who sit in the corner and said ‘We’re going to take care of kitties now,’” Sue says. But the Augusta couple will be associated with cats forever in some people’s minds thanks to their legally risky decision to care for feral felines and the work of a New York-based documentary filmmaker. “Catnip Nation,” a film which feature the Joneses, was shown at the Tallgrass Film Festival in Wichita last month and will make its way to the Kansas International Film Festival in Overland Park this month. It’s been well received at film festivals
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on the East Coast and will be available via streaming services next year. Asked if she ever expected her championing of half-wild cats to catch the attention of so many people, Sue Jones laughs and says, “No, absolutely not. That just came completely out of the blue.” Sue Jones grew up in Augusta, where her dad was a longtime Lennox dealer and electrical contractor. She returned and opened an interior design business after marrying and spending 35 years in management jobs in Colorado, Houston and elsewhere; Ray Jones worked in marketing. In 2014, after moving her business to a new location in downtown Augusta, Sue noticed a colony of feral cats
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Sue and Ray Jones posed ‘American Gothic’-style for the makers of a documentary film.
behind the store. “I started feeding them and giving them water,” she said. The city of Augusta issued citations to both of the Joneses, which they paid. When See Feral, page 6
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